It must be one of and perhaps the most important legacy Her Excellency Elizabeth Carriere intends to leave behind in Montserrat at the end of her tenure as Governor. From her arrival, the Governor had noted that a public service and how it functioned was integral to the development… delivering quality of service to the public they deserve from their Public Service.

She spoke about a customer service delivery to the public from the civil service as key principles of the reform process.

She had seen problems and mentioned “On the point about relationships with the public this is part attitudinal, its part training, its part issues around having the right people in the right places… it really is also an attitude that the public service is a public service and we must carry out the right kind of service not just for Montserratians but also for people who are visiting Montserrat, so this is also an area of focus for improvement.

Upon this background with the full backing of government with co-leadership via the Deputy Premier they came up with plans to transform human resource management in the Montserrat public service.

She continued to talk for months the need to reinvigorate the public service, to make it fit for purpose for the times we are living in and the demands of the public. They finally formulated an “Empowering Excellence Program” EEP.

The program began and task force set up. A manager was appointed to take the program (EEP) forward in Cheverlyn Williams-Kirnon (Mrs.). On June 28 Mrs. Williams and her public sector team joined the Governor at her press conference and provided an update on the initiative which is being undertaken through Human Resource Transformation, on stream for about four months.

She reported: “We have established the public sector taskforce and they started working from the 1st March and we are now into three months completed of the program, the implementation of the Empowerment Excellence Program. We are presently finalizing our action plan in terms of what are the actions we are required to perform going forward and we are just about completing what the actions and the tasks are going to be.”

After each of her team presented on their roles on the task force, Williams noted that the main aim is to ensure that, “we run with this HR Transformation initiative and we engage all the different levels within the public sector in order to ensure that there is full collaboration and cooperation and engagement from all,” pointing out they were looking at providing front line officers with name badges so that persons are aware of who they are dealing with and the posts that they hold in terms of our front line staff.

We are also presently on the government radio station promoting the Empowering Excellence Program because we want to be able to ensure that we empower the public officers in order to provide excellent service.

Mrs Williams touted: “There are some initiatives that we felt must be implemented immediately in order to show that we are moving towards that excellent standard within the public services. These are being advanced as we speak in that several programs are running in order to address customer service and telephone etiquette within the government service… we have also set up the private sector advisory committee and that has been started and established from the 7th June.”

Chivonne Gerald and Clarice Yearwood are the chairman and secretary respectively of the Private Sector Committee

The 45 members of the task force are expected to make their contributions to the program over an initial 18-month period and beyond.